


盲目的

by orphan_account



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Dark, Gen, Good Writing, Graphic Description of Corpses, Heavy Angst, I Don't Even Know, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Kyubey is Awful, Magic, Out of Character, Short Chapters, Swearing, [sometimes], but what do you expect its Madoka Magica, hopefully, like seriously, lol, people die
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 03:30:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15258450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Set in a somewhat modern world, a virus dubbed 盲目的 has eradicated 62.1% of the human population in a span of 25 years. Nobody knows what caused the virus to reappear, or why it did after so long, but all they know that it's absolutely deadly- and it's killing off the human race at a rapid rate.Kaname Madoka, one of the 27.9% left, finds that a creature named Kyubey has offered her and her friend Sayaka a deal- give 10 people that you wish immunity to the disease, but in exchange become puella magi and fight "witches," mutations that came off the corpses of the infected- but she soon finds that there is something far darker lying in the breaches of what seems to be an irresistible deal.[Rated Mature for swearing, graphic descriptions of gore, and violence. Slight explicit themes, but not enough to deem it explicit.]





	盲目的

**Author's Note:**

> Some phrases are in Japanese, but to those who don't understand it don't worry! There's always translation notes at the beginning.  
> Thank you for reading this random story.. I need to clean it up a bit, but I hope you enjoy what's there!
> 
> Translation notes for Chapter 1:  
> “アウトブレイクが停止した” = Outbreak halted/stopped  
> “盲目的” = Mōmokuteki. Since the program is supposed to be for adults, it is written purely in kanji. Mōmokuteki roughly translates to “blindness." due to the fact that the first symptoms are blindness and extreme vomiting. More on this later in this chapter.  
> 100 yen = 1 USD.
> 
> (Most of the stories I write are stories I wouldn't read, haha.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This world, riddled by disease, was simply funereal."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

> _There's no cure for Mōmokuteki.  
>  _

 

20 YEARS AGO

The hazy image faded into view as the TV flickered on from the meager amount of electricity available- she sat in front of the television, desperately trying to pick up on what was being said. She, like many others, hoped that the cure to 盲目的 would arrive. She, like many other children turned on the television at an ungodly hour in the foolish hope somebody somewhere would portray that headline; “アウトブレイクが停止した”  
But, as Junko had learned, there was only one word that would be uttered, only one word they would say; 盲目的. She couldn’t read kanji, but she’d heard the word enough to make her want to vomit whenever they uttered it.

Mōmokuteki.

“Mōmokuteki’s already spread through about 20% of the world,” the reporter hesitantly stated to the other, gaze uneasy. “Do you think that just maybe,” he paused, “it might wipe us out?”  
Disturbing images flashed across the screen- red against the white of hospital sheets next to a flatline, limbs that had fallen off completely, toilets with those from Stage 2 with blood smeared all over the bathroom floors and walls.  
  
“Of course, Mōmokuteki was what nearly wiped us out approximately 1,000 years ago.. progress on stopping it has been slow as well. For every person saved, nearly 100 die- save in the context of prolonging survival. I'd almost say," the other reporter took a cigarette out of his mouth, "that we're completely fucked. There's no cure for Mōmokuteki, no matter how old, young, or lucky you might be."

“Once you’ve caught Mōmokuteki,” he said in an oddly flat mannerism, “the only choice you have is death.”

There was an uncomfortable pause before the other reporter continued with his report, noticeably more despondent than before.  
“Do you think that Mōmokuteki has something to do with the sudden increase in the price of medicines and medical care?”

“Definitely.”

 _Quite the pessimistic reporter,_ Junko dryly noted as she shuffled around in her blankets, taking in a whiff of the thick, dusty attic air that caught in her lungs. The same lungs that, five days ago, had burnt as she sobbed over the poignant death of her best friend, a death caused by Stage 2 of the inequitable virus that was Mōmokuteki.Her parents told her to get over it, to forget about it because in the first place she was going to die anyways. But how could she if it was slowly killing them all?

“Adults and teenagers are the most vulnerable to it, as odd as it may be, but the government has been considering restricting the time of outdoor time of citizens to 1 hour a day, and for vendors to shut down. One drop of sweat from an infected on those kinds of things, and you’ve got an entire town dead. Just like that. Families die. Dogs look on as their owners fall to the floor, because nobody can stop it when Mōmokuteki comes to a household. Some people compare it to Ebola because it's spread from bodily fluids."

He paused.

"When the sweat of someone infected goes onto a coffee mug, and someone healthy picks up that coffee mug, the virus is already on that person. It's just a matter of how long it'll take to get to the bloodstream. Public toilets aren't safe. Hell, even bed sheets aren't safe. Might as well sleep in a forest. In five years, already 20% of the population is deceased. Where will we put the bodies is what some people are wondering. In the ocean? It'll contaminate the water. In the ground? The crops will become deadly. All we can do now is keep the rest of us safe by completely killing off the infected."  
  
"Isn't that a pretty shitty way to think about it?" This station was quite vulgar.  
  
"Why the hell do you think I'm still here? My wife begged me to kill her when she caught it. _Save the kids,_ she wailed, _don't let me infect them with Mōmokuteki too._ "

Her vision had grown blurry, she realized.  
She was crying.  
Why was she crying? She didn’t react to this in the dozens of other times she’d done this at 3:00 A.M, so why now?  
Maybe, she thought, it was the same reason that she was too afraid to turn on the TV- because the death of her friend exposed her to the horrors that Mōmokuteki had brought upon, the horrors she had never thought of before now.

She sharply shook her gaze from the TV to the scene of the attic door creaking as it opened, revealing her mom with a look of pure and unadulterated anger.  
The color drained out of Junko’s face in a heartbeat as she robotically shut off the television, engulfing the room in an empty darkness.

The girl wished she hadn’t- she felt as if the darkness had made the anger even more unnerving.  
  
There was a long silence as sweat slowly generated on her forehead, as her mother's gaze became even more piercing.

"Talk of this- t-this _shit_ named Mōmokuteki is forbidden in this house,” her mother stated icily. Yet, Junko thought, she could hear the fear buried deep in her voice, where her mother hoped nobody would find it.

She wanted that fear to go away.  
Junko moved to encompass her mother in a hug as she sputtered out a string of curses, seemingly directed at nowhere- but she didn't mind.  
  
“I’ll protect you from Mōmokuteki. I promise.”  
  
It came out as a whisper, but to her, it was a resolution.

  
PRESENT

"Another one," Madoka noted wistfully as she viewed the body being lifted from the window. It was a cold night, marked by the ice that made the workers tread carefully on their feet. Going outside was prohibited hours after a death caused by Mōmokuteki; it was always broadcast on the TV in an emotionless, robotic voice.  
"Mōmokuteki."  
That's all it would ever say. Maybe it knew they got the message- step outside, touch the victim with your bare hands and get shot in the head. It was their way of preventing the disease spreading to the rest of the town.  
  
Nobody knew where they went after they died.  
The government insisted the same thing- they were put in a quarantined chamber, far away from any populated areas, but Madoka had always had the lingering suspicion that there was another far more desolate place they were carried off too.  
  
Sometimes she'd draw sketches of what the place might have looked like- blood smeared on the gray, cylindrical walls, workers in protective clothing.. The scent in there must be putrid- but the real horror was the bodies. Their eyes must be dull and glazed, with dried blood under their fingertips; sometimes the legs were purple and wrinkled to the point that it looked as if someone had twisted them around like towels. Perhaps their arms would even be ripped off, revealing what lay under that skin that always seemed to hang onto the bone; just red meat that looked similar to slime, and mouths that were always, always open as if they were terrified. Blood occasionally stained the crotch area of their pants, which was just another side effect of Stage 2- kidney failure.  
  
She didn't let anybody peer at these disturbing, grotesque drawings.

The girl ran a hand through her pink hair as she tried to hold back the vomit and tears at the sight of the body being carried. That body was the one of who was once her best friend; Hitomi Shizuki, who had been, by the looks of it, shabbily killed with a knife in the later stages of Stage 1. It made sense. Doing it professionally (and painlessly) was 50,000,000 yen- nobody in this town could have afforded that.  
Just like the other bodies she had theorized, her eyes were blank and unlike how they had once been; full of life and vigor, each of her actions filled with a level of sophistication that Madoka envied.  
  
Now she was just another corpse, forgotten like the billions of more people who had died.  
  
Stage 1, she bitterly thought, was just the beginning. Stage 1 was marked by blindness and extreme vomiting. Maybe it was all a cruel joke that just the other day, she herself had almost been quarantined after a stomach bug had caused her to vomit in the middle of class, the daily class that was just one long reminder of how to prevent the spread of Mōmokuteki- of which they almost always reviewed the same acronym..

見, the beginning kanji for 見知らぬ人を信頼しないでください. [don't trust strangers]  
手, for 手を洗いなさい. [wash your hands]  
屋, for 屋内にいる. [stay indoors]

While she found it just a bit funny, it was also depressing; the fact that their everyday life was marked by loss, as one by one, their town was destroyed from the virus. Yet, she stood there, pitifully acknowledging the facts- there was absolutely nothing she could have done to stop it.  
All she could do was stand by, watching as they were carried off to the very same place that she often imagined vividly in her dreams, the place that they often said was a "safe quarantine."

None of them even got a burial. They were just _there_ , completely forgotten.  
It wasn't fair.

"It's not fucking fair," she hissed under her breath despite of herself, hoping nobody was around to hear her curse so insensitively. The fact that instead of helping, all anyone would do was turn a blind eye, afraid that maybe, just maybe, it would come to them. The fact that the doctors, who were supposed to help, only helped the richest, because medical expenses had rised 102.71% in just the past year- the middle class could never imagine being able to afford that.

The government should be trying to help them, not contain them. Lives could be saved if they weren't such dastardly cowards- hidden in their offices, looking down at them from above, because "in a crisis, we need a strong leader."  
The leader isn't a goddamn strong leader. He's a fucking coward, just like she was every single day of her life. As more and more of them died, they both stood there, watching as people suffocate on their own vomit because their throats can't function properly. Every single thing she did- walking, breathing, being able to feel, was something she took for granted and used to be like a bystander of an unjust murder.

Madoka hated herself for that fact.  
  
_Then maybe_ , a voice eerily suggested, _you should become a puella magi._

She swirled around, looking for the source of the voice, but there was none.   
"My imagination?" she wondered, setting herself into her original position and glancing at the homework she should've been doing, but it was just a bit drab to ponder over calculus she knew she would only get average marks on. That's how it was for everything in her life- everything was average. Her income, her grades, her looks.  
  
Frustration built up in her veins as she stared at the paper, asking for the equation to calculate volume. She didn't give a crap about any of this homework- how could they, while seeing their own students die one by one, just pretend everything was _okay?_

  
Madoka released the air she hadn't realized she had been holding, and then ripped the papers in two.  
  
7:37 A.M, NEXT DAY  
  
"Hitomi died, huh?" Sayaka sighed, treading in the snow that had gathered overnight. Madoka merely nodded, keeping her eyes ahead. She tried not to focus on the death of the second to last friend she had that hadn't died of the virus- tried not to focus on the fact that teenagers were one of the age groups most susceptible to the virus.  
"She didn't even properly put herself down," Madoka muttered furiously. "She died in a bush, because she was selfless enough to keep herself away from us."  
  
The other girl remained silent.  
  
"Oh," she simply replied. "But don't get so caught up over it, Madoka! We have to do what she would want us to do! We have to keep movin-"  
  
" _And just forget about her?! I'd rather go to hell!_ " the pink haired girl snapped, wiping at the tears threatening to leak at her eyes. She knew it was wrong to put the blame on Sayaka, but she couldn't help the frustration, grief, and inadequacy that seeped into her heart- somehow, no matter how selfishly, she felt as if she had to take them out of system one way or another.  
"Do you honestly think that Hitomi _deserved_ to die of Mōmokuteki? If the system wasn't so corrupt and centered around money, then maybe she would have survived! But when they went to the hospital, they were turned down because they didn't have the money!"  
Her vision went watery as she uttered a pitiful sob, tears falling on her cheeks. "I don't want my family to die. I don't want _you_ to die, Sayaka. You're the only friend I have left now."  
  
"M-Madoka," her friend stuttered, moving to comfort the crying girl. "It wasn't your fault that she died. No matter if she had medicine, she would still go into Stage 2 and die of heart failure."  
"Maybe if I could actually make a difference," Madoka muttered despondently, unmoved by Sayaka's word.  
"That's not true!" Sayaka opposed, spinning her around to face her in an uncomfortably close position. "She had a good life because you were her friend! You make a difference in a lot of lives!" She jabbed her index finger [quite painfully] on the girl's nose. "If you ever say you're worthless again, I won't forgive you, Madoka, because you're my bestest friend ever!"  
  
"Bestest.. friend," she echoed, pondering over the feeling of wanting to vomit at the sight of Hitomi's dead body.  
  
"Even if you caught Mōmokuteki, I'd stay with you to the end!" Sayaka chirped. Of course. That was the kind of person she was. Happy-go-lucky.  
"They'd shoot you!" Madoka protested, pushing her away. She only grinned harder. "But that's what best friends are for! Being with each other until the end! Even if I get shot, even if I have to pee blood for the rest of my life, I'll be with you, Madoka! Promise you'll do the same to me?"

Hitomi's comfortless corpse flashed briefly in her mind. For Hitomi, who had died alone, it must've been even more painful- having nobody to even comfort her as she had slit her own throat, in the bushes where she hoped nobody would be contaminated with her bacteria. The bush, she thought distastefully, was probably even cut down by now.  
This world, riddled by disease, was simply funereal; if being with Sayaka at her inevitable end would help her, then she should do it.  
  
"I promise," she promised resolutely, "to be with you until the end."  
  
  
  
  
  
"Yesterday, Shizuki died in the later stages of Stage 1. It is reported that at midnight, she went into a bush approximately 3 kilometers from her house and slit her throat with a kitchen knife. We are deeply affected by her loss, but in her place, a transfer st-"  
Without letting her finish, a long black haired girl had stepped into the classroom. Madoka found her oddly familiar, but she decided to shrug it off as seeing a similar person before. Lots of people had long, black hair, right?  
Turning her back to the class, she wrote her name on the board.

"Akemi Homura," she read out loud as she wrote the letters. "I hope to have a nice semester with you all- those who survive, of course," she muttered under her breath, though it seemed to Madoka that she was the only one who had caught that last bit.  
The noises made by the empty classroom faded into white noise as she observed 'Homura,' who seemed to stare directly into her- picking out the things she didn't like and liked about her.

Madoka had found that she had a bit of dislike toward the way she glanced at her, as if she already knew everything that would unfold.  
"Suspicious," Sayaka muttered into her ear as her classmates surrounded this new, mysterious girl. Perhaps they were fascinated at the concept of gaining, and not losing- much more often there was the announcement that one of them had died once again.  
"How'd you get your hair so long?"  
"What sports do you play?"  
Questions bombarded her, and she couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for Homura. Every second, there was a new question overlapping the previous, the absurdity eclipsing the one that had come before it.  
  
"I don't feel well," Madoka had heard her say, "so I'll let the Nurse's Aide take me to the Nurse's Office."  
_She_ was the Nurse's Aide.  
Madoka kept back a gulp of anxiety as she went directly in front of her desk, placing a hand on the chipped, rough wood.

"You're the Nurse's Aide, correct?"

The pink haired girl could only nod at the intimidating aura.  
The two excited the room together as she went to lead Homura, but she soon found that it seemed as if.. she already knew the way.  
  
Perfectly, in fact.  
  
After a few minutes of walking, they suddenly paused at the glass hallway.

"Madoka," she finally said, "I'd rather go to hell than let you become a puella magi."

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this story. In all honesty, it's a bit bad, especially for all the time I spent on it. Hehe.
> 
> The reason Madoka finds it funny is because the acronym translates to "A good-looking store."


End file.
